thoughts I do not want to keep in my head

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Monthly Archives: January 2012

Hair comes in many lengths, shapes, sizes, textures. One can spend a lot of time studying somebody else’s hair. And that is before you get started doing things to the hair – stroking it, brushing it, shampooing it, rinsing it, taking out knots, braiding, twissling, cutting … and so much more.

But most importantly, it’s a way to spend a lot of time focusing on one specific human being, both by physical and mental contact … and to have someone put that focus on you.

My hair is long and wavy, thin yet I have many hairs. This makes my hair high maintenance – it takes quite a bit of time to wash and keep well-brushed, and that’s just the minimum to keep it presentable. Furthermore, I shed a lot of hair, which means I often have to clean up hair in my home (otherwise it accumulates) and people can sometimes tell when I’ve been in a room just by the hair left behind.

However, I think that’s why my hair fascinates people. It needs a lot of work … so people can spend a like of time working on it. And because of its long, wavy nature, creative people can find many things to do with my hair. This is fortunate, because when it comes to hair-playing, to borrow a term from sex culture, I am a ‘bottom’.

When I was in elementary school, girls would ask me if they could play with my hair. And I almost always said yes. I loved having people play with my hair.

Later, in college, while I never had quite as many opportunities to have my hair played with as in elementary schools, I had some. And even when people didn’t play with my hair, I could often at least get someone in my family to brush my hair.

It’s been over a year since I’ve had somebody else interact with my hair. And I miss it. How am I supposed to go about finding somebody to play with my hair? If I were still in California, I would probably put an ad on Craigslist, but I’m not in California. I suppose, if I were desperate, I could go to a hair salon, but I don’t want to change my hair, I merely want people to play with it. And if it really was a high priority in my life, I would risk embarrassment and humiliation to find a hair-playing buddy.

I wish, however, that I could find a hair-playing buddy with a much lower risk of embarrassment and humiliation. I wish there were a local hair-playing community where people who love to play with hair could find people who love having their hair played with.

I have had fantasies since puberty which happen to have featured sex – and always sex with males. Thus, I naively assumed that they were sex fantasies, and that I was heterosexual. But over time, I noticed certain things.

The vast majority of the fantasies ended with me being pregnant

I also, once in a while, have fantasies about going to sperm donor clinics, in spite of the fact that I do not have good feelings about medical equipment

I also have fantasies about being pregnant which do not have sex

The idea of myself having any kind of sex which cannot get me pregnant (using contraceptives, oral sex, etc.) is quite unappealing

Now, I have to make this very clear – I think everybody should have a good sex education, and I think contraceptives should be available to everyone. I have no problem with other people using contraceptives. On an intellectual level, I think using contraceptives is often a very good idea. On a gut, irrational level, using contraceptives feels pointless to me – why are people having sex if they are not trying to get a baby?

It should be clear by now that I don’t have much of a sex drive / libido / whatever the heck makes people want sex for the sake of sex. Instead, I have a pregnancy drive. While it seems obvious right now, it definitely was not obvious when I was a teenager.

So do I, in fact, want to get pregnant? According to my guts, the answer is a big fat YES. But there is this pesky little issue that after getting pregnant, I would (hopefully) have a child to rear. I do not want to raise a child at this point in my life. Another pesky little issue is that I would want my child to have a close social relationship with the father, which rules out anonymous sperm donation. Yet I have no interest in getting married or any other traditional parenting relationship, and I would not want to have more sex than necessary to get pregnant. And I’d like the father to be good at parenting. This would require constructing an alternative parenting relationship, going against a bunch of social conventions, with just the right type of person. I am nowhere close to having this type of relationship in place. Maybe I never will have this relationship in place. Thus, I am not trying to get pregnant right now.

I suspect there will be a number posts in the future about how an asexual with a pregnancy drive can arrange to get pregnant and have a child. I cannot exclude the possibility that I will write posts about how an asexual with a pregnancy drive can live without actually getting pregnant – but I have not given up on eventually becoming pregnant yet, and right now I hope that I will never write such a post.

When I was about 16 years old, my mother told me that it was okay that I wasn’t having sex and that I wasn’t interested in sex. She said that she was the same way when she was that age. Then she told me that she only started having sex when she was 22. And when she started having sex, it was because of peer pressure, not an inner desire to start having sex. However, she eventually found men she really wanted to have sex with. In other words, my mother was a late-bloomer.

So for years I thought I was just like my mother. I figured that since she was a late-bloomer, I was probably just a late-bloomer myself.

A few years later, my mother asked me if I liked any boys. I didn’t have much to say. I mentioned one boy who I thought was good-looking, and she asked me what color his eyes were. I answered that I didn’t know. She replied that if I didn’t know what color his eyes were, I didn’t really have a crush on him (while I think it’s possible to crush on people without knowing what color their eyes are, she was correct as far as me not having a crush on that particular boy).

My mother was surprised by my lack of interest in boys, and she said that when she was my age that she had lots of crushes on boys. I was surprised that she had had that much interest in boys. I had been thinking that she had been just like me. Apparently not.

I started to suspect that I was not actually a “late-bloomer”.

About a couple years ago, I came out as asexual to my mother. I generally do not think it’s important for people to know I am asexual, though I also don’t try to hide it (except for in one situation I will probably describe in a future post). I thought she ought to know because she had expressed interest in my love life (or lack thereof), but mostly I thought it was important because it was a way for me to finally settle, between the two of us, that we were different; she is the late-bloomer; I am the asexual.

Immediately, she said that I was really just a late-bloomer, just like her. I expected this reply. I had to give her a little Asexuality 101, which I was also prepared for. Once she got used to the idea, however, I think she accepted that I am asexual. I think she might still think of me as a late-bloomer, but she is at least open to the possibility that I might never “bloom”.

I am no longer 22 years old. I’ve been blooming for a long time, just not in a sexual way.

I had been thinking about starting a blog for years. However, I never had ‘enough time’ to maintain a proper blog. Finally, I realized that I will never have ‘enough time’ to blog, so if I am going to blog, I have to do it now, when I don’t have ‘enough time’.

I think, on a deep level, I always knew I was asexual. Yet, on a surface, intellectual level, I identified as heterosexual. I knew that my experiences were very different from the experiences of other heterosexuals (such as that whole being-sexually-attracted-to-other-people thing) but I was okay with that.

When I heard of asexuality for the first time at the age of 18, I considered it. Then I dismissed the idea that I was asexual because, at the time, I thought that if you displayed anything feature associated with sexuality, you were not asexual.

Some time later, though, I discovered asexual blogs. And as I read about other asexuals’ experiences, I realized that my own experiences had a lot more in common with their stories than the stories of my heterosexual peers. That is when I first started identifying as asexual.

I plan to blog about various topics here, and I suspect that in the long run less than 50% of the posts will directly pertain to asexuality. However, since I found asexual blogs so helpful, I decided it is time to return the favor, and perhaps people might find my other experiences and thoughts helpful, or at least interesting.

I eventually settled on the title ‘The Notes Which Do Not Fit’ because I have many thoughts which I wish to express, both about asexuality and other topics, but for which I do not feel I have a forum in which I can express them. Thus, this place will be the home of my ‘notes’ which do not ‘fit’ elsewhere.